Africa’s Happiness, Hope & HIV

Dorinda Escamilla, R.N., who works with the Incarnate Word Sisters and at CHRISTUS Santa Rosa Hospital, holds a small child.

Postcards from Zambia

Randy Escamilla and the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word are on a humanitarian mission to Mongu, Zambia. It is the poorest and most remote part of this African nation.

Our final full day in Mongu, Zambia in the Zambeze River flood plain not far from Angola. Zambia is surrounded by nations that have suffered real threats to democracy and violence. Thank God Zambia, so far, has been spared the terror facing its neighbors.

Sister Walter Maher, one of the leaders of the San Antonio-based Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, saw first hand how the program the Congregation helped develop is saving African babies from AIDS. Throughout this short visit people told us life would be much different in Zambia without the help of the Incarnate Word Sisters.

We saw more than a hundred women with HIV and their infants crowded into the Mother & Infant Care Program office to get their supply of milk formula and weigh their babies. We now know that the Sisters of the Incarnate Word are saving babies — over and over babies are testing HIV-negative because mothers with HIV are choosing to give their babies formula instead of breast milk, which has the greatest risk of HIV transmission. It was so beautiful to see chubby babies so alive, thriving and with age-appropriate motor skills.

Zambian women with HIV hold their babies while sitting under a print of Our Lady of Africa.

Sister Walter Maher of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word shares a tender moment.

Few mothers know of the Incarnate Word Sisters or San Antonio, Texas. The nuns do not proselytize, rather focusing on education and health care — in a nutshell we call that “human dignity.”

Zambia’s not the gloomy place I first encountered in October, 2007. Now, families are able to feel slightly better because their babies now have a future. Children are being educated. But the process is going to be long and slow. Very long.

Poverty, the lack of clean water and electricity are serious issues. It’s bad, but now — because of the help of people who care — we’re witnessing the fruits of very holy women from Zambia and the United States. If you’d like to contribute and help save African babies from AIDS log on to www.AmorMeus.Org and go to “You can help.”